Where did you learn about Christianity?

Americans are said to be pretty religious yet their religious literacy is pretty underdeveloped:
“The paradox is this: Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. They are Protestants who can’t name the four Gospels, Catholics who can’t name the seven sacraments, and Jews who can’t name the five books of Moses. Atheists may be as rare in America as Jesus-loving politicians are in Europe, but here faith is almost entirely devoid of content. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.” (Stephen Prothero)

That must obviously come from a lack of education. Most of America’s children are not allowed to learn about religion in school. So where could they gain religious literacy? Taking school out of the educational equation leaves people ill-informed and under-informed. One has to make a conscious effort to learn that kind of stuff. Tom Moore mourns:
“This American secularity is strange, perhaps even stranger than American religion. We are okay forcing our children to swear a pledge of allegiance to one nation under God, but the vast majority of public schools aren’t okay teaching our children who Jesus, or Muhammad, or the Buddha was. These figures may or may not have been divine (how should I know?), but let’s not for a second pretend they don’t matter. Every American should graduate from high school with at least a basic understanding of the five major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism), religions which most Americans today have a hard time even naming.

So where did you read the Bible? What about the Qur’an? The Bhagavad Gita? Let’s turn our public schools into a safe, critical environment where these texts, so foundational to the cultures of the world, can be read. Until we do, America shall remain crippled, staggering blindly through a world where religion, like it or not, still matters.”

This post was inspired by my reading of “America’s Four Gods”:

If you live anywhere near Provo, UT, come and join us for this Lent Study.